Art As Devil Currency, & Clinton’s Fading Worth

Why Clinton Won’t Be President Again, And Why Art Is Tax Evasion:

“If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person. It’s how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit.” [― William J. Clinton.]

This is typical of the sound-good idiocies we have to learn not to take as below our dignity to lash out after. Sophisticated thinking is of no help if the worst thinking is left unmolested, free to grow, corrupt, and rule, most minds

Neither G. W. Bush, nor Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Tse Tung, or the Khmer Rouges, or Louis XIV, or Philip II of Spain, or Antipater of Macedonia, ever quit, but it would have been better if they had. And as the Romans had it: “Perseverare Diabolicum”.

Learning from mistakes can go both ways: to profit humanity at large, or profit the learning individual. The latter may, or may not profit the humanity at large.

If one never quits, just to embrace the Dark Side, ever more, methinks matters are not improving for humanity, at large. That Bill Clinton thinks learning made him a better person, automatically, is only the sort of self-indulgence he is famous for, and which will probably cost his wife the presidency.

Dark Currency: Such A Beauty Cannot Be Taxed Or Detected

[That painting was sold at auction for more than 170 million dollars… to a “former taxi cab driver turned billionaire art collector”… I will be even more interested to know his connections to the Triads, the multi-century old Chinese crime organizations. It’s already known that the entire gambling industry on Asia is connected to sophisticated money laundering.]

And why no Clinton again? The sheeple is not that dumb, that it cannot smell something is amiss. The Clinton presidency was as devastating for the (world) middle class as that of G. W. Bush. A difference: Clinton was part of the pre-condition for G. W. Bush.

It’s not just that Clinton deregulated, thus unleashed the financial sharks onto the world (thus making possible the economic crash which followed 2008). It’s not just that Clinton got away with it. It is that the crushing success of propaganda was blatant: because Clinton was a “Democrat”, he could only be doing good.

Hence Clinton, by succeeding to make the meek, weak proverbial little guys feel that finance unchained was good for them, showed that there were no limits to what propaganda could achieve. The lies of Blair and Bush were just a further little step away.

This is why Quantitative Easing (giving ever more money to banks who had caused the crisis) has been glorified as the way out of the 2008 crisis.

Now there is a new twist. A twist within the twist, after the “Twist” (the Federal Reserve of the USA actually set-up a bank helping scheme it had the effrontery to call… “The Twist”).

The twist has been this: the banks have been slowly squeezed under “Dodd-Frank”… While, discreetly, “Dark Money” in “Dark Pools” or not, has been unleashed, more than ever.

Hence the on-going rise in the price of “art”. “Art is parallel currency: it’s often not taxed (even in France!). It goes across borders, get stored in other countries, and change hand to hand, without having to be declared to the authorities. Meanwhile the little guys one thousand dollars (let alone euros!) transactions are scrutinized, and meticulously registered. The currency of the wealthiest people on Earth is a Dark Currency, so dark authorities themselves can’t see, let alone understand it. Why would you want to understand your masters, except to please them?

So what of the Commons in all this? The Commons smell a rat. A rotting rat, and Clinton reminds them of that smell.

So does, by the way Jebb Bush, the latest model from that (Hitler sprung) dynasty. This is why (pseudo) anti-establishment candidates have been running strong.

Yet, the Devil lurks in the ugly, most obscure, worst smelling corners. As long as the Commons are not willing to quit their comfort zone, to relish exploring those disgusting places (as I obviously do), their understanding, thus their action, will not disrupt the oligarchy’s mental order enough to unsettle it.

15 Responses to “Art As Devil Currency, & Clinton’s Fading Worth”

I think the mother of all problems is the rise of inequality in power. From there the rise in stupidity, and brutality of the oligarchy. Then terrible decisions ensue, including about resources. Roma went through this. It took generations before disaster struck. Here disaster has already struck (see WWI and WWII holocausts).

Dear Patrice, we are at the eve of new economic and political era. The WWW is bringing to the world revolutionary economic changes with significance comparable to the change brought James Watt with his steam machine. Your criticisms of the existing system is correct, but i would like to focus on the near future. Very few if any one could predict at end of 18 century how will look the world 100 years later. We are of course much more aware of the changing world around us, but also the speed of change is much faster than it was 250 years ago. But back to the issues of economics and politics, we can see already the cutting intermediation rates in every aspect of commerce. Amazon started selling books, look what range of products it offers now. You can read economists (mainly with pro republican inclination) how surprised they are, when the economic model predicting translation of buget deficit and money printing to inflation doesn’t work. And until recently very little of system changing options the internet opened in industrial production was introduced. But with the introduction of 3D printers and oither similar technologies probably all this will change. People will start to print products at home, while choosing the product and its design directly out of the web. All what will be needed are printing machines and some powder compound raw material, mostly combination of carbon, silicon and metals. No more need for mass producing factories. All you need is a product disigner, printing machine and the compound. It will be a production method called “just in time at home”.

When Paul Volcker raised interest rates, one of the methods he used was to sell government bonds the Fed had originally bought to create the money in the first place.
Who did he sell them too? Private investors. So by that logic, the excess currency was in the hands of those with an excess of wealth.
Now inflation really didn’t go away until ’82, by which time the deficit had hit 200 billion dollars, which was real money in those days. So the Treasury was issuing fresh bonds and selling them to who? The same private investors the Fed would be selling to. Not to mention the Treasury was selling far more than the Fed.
So what should they have done with all the money they collected? Spend it on social programs, more weapons, infrastructure? Frankly what really matters isn’t the broad sweep of spending, but how wisely it is spent. Whatever it is spent on, if there is no long term return, it will be a form of bubble and anyone depending on it will eventually get hurt and those most likely to profit from it will be the contractors who will be more concerned with their own profits, than the quality of the services.
There is much deeper issue here and that does go to the nature of how money functions as a social contract, but quickly also becomes a rent extraction process, for both governments and financial companies. As you point out, governments which grow beyond their social mandate are plutocracies and they only think of the general population as cannon fodder for the schemes of the elites. So giving them the tools to do so, on the expectation they will only be used for good is not wise.
A functioning society requires a strong organic connectivity, not just some very broad based monetary medium to tie it together.
You could create a successful large society, but it would still require a strong local foundation. Such as how our democratic system is supposed to work, with local, regional and a national government. We need a financial circulation system which is built around the same premises, so that local communities can fund their own structural foundations and seek strength as part of larger coalitions.
The monetary medium would be understood as a broad social contract, involving both rights and responsibilities. Such that excesses would be taxed out, not borrowed out. Then people would learn to invest directly into their normal needs, from childcare to retirement, as broad social functions, not privatized and atomized expectations, supposedly funded through an omnipotent financial mechanism.
Its one freaking planet and its all we have.

Excellent analysis.
An obvious type of infrastructure is the MENTAL one. It’s actually the fundamental one. It’s also called EDUCATION. One should spend as much on it as, say, in the 1950s (this is true for Europe, or the USA). Spending is of course relative. Education should be free and of the HIGHEST quality, starting with preschool, all the way to the doctorate/MBA/etc.
Teachers salaries should be at least TWICE what they are now. (But then they would have to perform!!!!)

Yes, training is essential to the system.
Though a functioning society needs some system, it still needs to be better understood and not just dictated.
I think the problem is that we never learned the difference between absolutes and ideals. Whether it is monotheism, monarchism, totalitarianism, or even a mathematical universe, form is assumed to be the absolute. When the reality is that in the absolute, all form cancels out, so consequently society all devolves into conflicts between extremists of one variety and another.

Absolute is purity. The philosophic definition being ultimate reality regarded as uncaused, unmodified, unified, and complete, timeless, etc. (Webster’s)
No deviations, distinctions, imperfections, etc. Like absolute zero has no fluctuations, energy, etc.
Now form would be distinction, difference, shape, etc.
With mathematical universe theory, perfect form is considered to be absolute, as in a perfect circle or square is universal and unchanging, etc, but what gives it form? If you had a void, with nothing to manifest form, then there could be no shape, ideal or real. Mathematically a dimensionless point or line is a contradiction, since anything multiplied by zero is zero. Similarly any form, if it has nothing to give it form, doesn’t exist. It is a multiple of zero. There is no form in the void.
So form cannot be an absolute. Once you have distinction and variation, then you can have ideal forms. Those which are the most efficient, simple, clear, etc. For example, the most efficient route from point A to B would be considered the ideal. So a circle is an ideal definition of area, because it is the most efficient shape for area and so you see many circles in nature, but there are not so many squares in nature, because it isn’t as efficient, except for putting lots together and so there are lots of squares in human constructs.
Beauty, for instance, is considered an expression of the ideal, but the idea of an absolute beauty would be nonsense.
Similarly the premise of God is of an all-knowing absolute, in the words of Pope John Paul 2. Yet knowledge is a function of perception and distinction. An objective point of view is a contradiction. When you combine multiple perspectives, the result is whiteout, much like leaving the shutter of a camera open. Knowledge and thus meaning are the signal we extract from the masses of noise and information swirling about. Of which there is no objective view.
So the monotheistic premise of God is the all-knowing spirit, but a spiritual absolute would be the ground state, the pure awareness, not any particular form or point of view it may hold. The new born babe, not the wizened old man.
It would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

Patrice,
It does have to have some larger context and that is what is lost. Personally I had a very minimal formal education and mostly taught myself from reading and personal experience. I will readily admit there is a lot I don’t know, but I do have strong sense of my own limits, as I’ve spent a great deal of time examining how they form and define who I am. Making wrong decisions will get me physically hurt. Yet today, much of what is being assumed all seems illusionary and delusional.
Is it really that hard to figure out that money functions as a voucher system and essentially designing the entire economy to basically produce enormous amounts of excess vouchers is really stupid? It isn’t a matter of “taxing the rich.” it’s matter of understanding what money is in the first place.
We have an atomized culture, with the primary medium being a currency system designed to suck all potential value out of every exchange and relationship. Your argument just means redirecting some of this extracted value into areas not preferential to those controlling the system, not how to replace the system with a more organically functioning society.

Dear Brodix: you said you had a family business, no? Education is a general, country wide thing. A few can get by without formalities. Me or you. For example. Yet, overall what you and me could acquire on the ground, for whatever reasons, it has to be forced on everybody. That is why EDUCATION IS MANDATORY. Quality has to be improved. Like in the past, when the WEST had the best education in the world.

Gmax,
I realize mine is a bit of an old world situation and that everyone has to be adapted to the situations in which they will find themselves.
Yet to the extent education currently reflects society, it seems increasingly more of a profit center to further drain wealth out of a community, as much as the old school sense of putting it into the community. Which does mean having occupations for what is being educated toward, as well as educating to what the community needs. Which is to say, the parasites seem to be more and more in control, yet even parasites need a healthy host.
There was a time when the west was very healthy, in many ways, but it has weakened and that goes far beyond education.

Dear Brodix, You rise several issues i would like comment too. The increase of interest rate as the wonder pill against stagflation was a lucky strike. The stagflation originated from the steep increase in the oil price at 1973, its effect on world economies can be seen as taxation of oil importing countries by the oil producing countries. This is why the inflation came with high unemployment. Also it is needed to be said that oil was much more important commodity at the time than now. Its price jumped twice, first at 1973 after the October war between Israel against Syria and Egypt, and then at 1980 with the outbreak of the golf war between Iran and Iraq. At todays prices if at 1972 the oil price was less than 20 $ per barrel, it peaked at 1980 to more than 100$ per barrel. but then its price started a slide and by 1985 it reached level of 30$ per barrel. Paul Volcker raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20% at 1981, exactly when the oil price started its slide. It is not obvious at all what brought down the inflation, the high interest rate or the drop of the oil price. What happened for sure was that the dollar value doubled between 1980 and 1985, what started a jump in US trade deficit, a problem that the US economy never overcame.

The other problem you are speaking about is the concentration of the wealth in the hand of very few, namely the financial sector. To my opinion the economic strength of the commercial banks has weakened since 2008 due to the quantitative easement policy, that in practical terms means supplying cash money, that at the end reaches the economically active entities, and replaces partly the banks as credit givers. Add to it the low interest rates, and with it the reduced bank margins in absolute terms, and you will understand that the bankster’s party is over.

There were and are lots of factors in play and even the experts have trouble sorting them out. Not to mention that those controlling the situation would prefer to emphasize some aspects over others.
For one thing, Johnson had help funding the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty with loose money policies, so inflation was already being built into the process. Another point was that much of the oil money the Arabs were making went right back into the New York banks and this added to inflation of investment assets.
I think the one clear point i think needs discussing is that we treat money as both a medium of exchange and a store of value and i think it is this blurring of what is a liquidity issue, with money as medium and the static nature of storage, which is at the root of many of our problems, in understanding how the system functions.
For example, as I’ve said before, in the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store and getting them mixed up creates clogged arteries, poor circulation and high blood pressure, to compensate. So, as I point out, if the threat was that excess capital would be taxed, as compared to investment in communities, there would be far less belief in money as a store and instead, it would flow into making communities,a s well as their environments, healthier and thus more valuable.

As for trade, remember that in order for the dollar to become the international currency that it is, large amounts of it had to be traded for the rest of the world’s goods, so the question arises as to whether the trade deficit was specifically manufactured to make the dollar the worlds currency? Which then made our banks much richer and our geopolitical position more powerful. At the mere expense of our manufacturing base.

Mes commentaires façon café du commerce n’ont pas connus trop de succès dernièrement, au grand dam de mon petit ego, so I’ll just double down, re HR Clinton & the Bush : when you mention Bill being a pre-condition (in the medical sense?) to GWB, it’s worth noting that IIRC/IUUC, while the “Whitewater”, “haircut” and al. scandals were crass politically engineered hit-pieces (the “Clinton kill list” still lives on), Hillary was certainly involved in the Irangate part of “Reagan sleaze” through the law firm she was working for, while governor Bill was certainly involved with (or at the very least aware of) the intelligence-protected drug pipeline ending in the Mena airport.
So, both were most likely insiders of that “underworld” (I’d need to retrieve the name, but the political godfather of Bill was a long-time close associate of the Bush family IIRC), of which the Bush dynasty was and probably is a leading player, middle-management or higher.
Not that there can’t be actual rivalries, as per organized crime “families” working together but vying for power, but I do recall being amused at a news clip of ex-president Bill and then-president GWB visiting Haiti I think.
Both having been shaking hands with enthusiastic locals, Bill happily does his crowd-pleaser stuff, while GWB looks a bit off (fear of germs and personal contact), and then mindlessly wipes one hand using Bill’s shirt as a towel.
Which is amusing, since a revealing tidbit about GWB was that he was in the habit of using his employees/underlings’ clothes to dry his hands after going to the bathroom, as a kind of bullying “joke”, if you wish. So, there, he was with Bill, and he mindlessly does the same “joke” he used to do to his hired help.
What does this tell us about the (perceived or real) pecking order?